Modern Arthurian legend a labour of love May 25, 2023
Posted by dolorosa12 in review reprint.Tags: arthuriana, books, memories, reviews
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This post is part of a series of articles that I previously published in various Australian newspapers when I was working as a reviewer between 2001 and 2012. The vast majority of these do not exist in digital format, and I’ve decided to reprint them here for digital preservation. Much of what is said in these republished reviews does not represent my current thinking, but rather my understanding at the time of writing and original publication. The titles of the posts are the titles that were given to the articles by subeditors upon publication.
What is it about the Arthurian legends that makes them irresistable to writers of the 20th, and, now, 21st century? Kevin Crossley-Holland’s third book in the engaging Arthur series, King of the Middle March, is but the latest in a deep corpus that stretches back to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958) and beyond to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the definitive interpretation of the Arthurian myth, written before the English Renaissance.
Crossley-Holland says, ‘The legends are a wellspring. A quarry. A wordhoard. They’re the product of many different writers, different times, different places. And there are hundreds of them. Between them, they embody the whole gamut of human behaviour, noble and vile, passionate, innocent and worldly wise. So, like the Old Testament, say, or the Greek or Norse myths, they’ll go on providing material for artists to remake in their own currency.’
The first book in Crossley-Holland’s series, The Seeing Stone, won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, the Tir na n-Og prize, and the Smarties Prize Bronze Medal, as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. The series is published in more than 20 languages. Crossley-Holland’s hero, Arthur de Caldicot, is a kinght’s son living in 12th-century England, growing up in the March region between England and Wales.
Crossley-Holland saw the coming of age of this boy as the perfect narrative with which to mix the Arthurian legends, building on the parallel stages of development of both Arthurs. ‘I saw the Arthurian legends as consisting of three stages: the boyhood of Arthur, the golden days of Camelot (the establishing of the Round Table, the great adventures of the knights, etc.) and Camelot’s decline and fall.’ The Arthur of Crossley-Holland’s series grows from naive boy to squire and, finally, in the third book, to a knight in the Crusades. The reader follows Arthur as he is moulded by many of the ideas and paradigms that shaped life in medieval Europe, his experiences at the Crusades ultimately temperating his idealism with a large dose of cynical understanding.
The Arthur series does not simply recast the Arthurian legends in another time and place. Crossley-Holland says, ‘The life of Arthur de Caldicot and the life of King Arthur are not mirror images, but they anticipate and reflect one another. Sometimes an Arthurian legend prompted a scene in Arthur de Caldicot’s life … Sometimes it was the other way round, and I went searching for a legend that would in some way illustrate an episode in Arthur de Caldicot’s life.’
The trilogy was something of a labour of love for Crossley-Holland, who spent many years planning some kind of work inspired by the Arthurian legends wihtout really knowing what type of book it would be. ‘The Arthurian legends are the Everest of western traditional tale: always there, always ahead, shining and littered with corpses! I’ve long wanted to step into Camelot — and had several duff shots at doing so. I wrote three-quarters of an adult “prison” novel about Sir Thomas Malory, and did straight retellings of sundry little-known legends, only to set them all aside. So the decision to use Arthur to underpin the trilogy was no flash in the pan.’ He extensively researched both Arthurian legends and medieval European history, even travelling twice with his wife to Venice and Croatia, following the route of the Crusaders as well as making repeated visits to the March-lands which border England and Wales.
The process of writing the Arthur series completely took over Crossley-Holland’s life. ‘I read and read and read about every facet of medieval life — feasting, fasting, singing, dancing, killing pigs, celebrating Halloween and birthdays and the Christian festivals, making armour, training horses, and so on. I pressed my nose to glass cases in museums; I talked to medievalists … I would say that 40 per cent of the time I spent on the trilogy was given to preparation of this kind.’
He says that The Seeing Stone, the first in the trilogy, was the easiest to write. ‘I sailed in, drawing deep on my own childhood. I cheerfully gave hostages to fortune, and experienced few of the complications in drawing the threads together. Also, no one knew what to expect, whether it would be any good. That’s to say, there was no pressure of expectation.’
Lovers of the Arthurian legends wanting to dip a toe into contemporary Arthurian-inspired literature could do no better than to sample Crossley-Holland’s Arthur series, while perhaps those inspired to look further afield could try Shallot and Return to Shallot, by Felicity Palmer. These stories connect the modern computer age with the story of the Lady of Shallot, with characters using an interactive computer game to gain entry into the world of medieval Britain.
Rosalinde Miles has rewritten these old legends from a feminist perspective, in her series Guinevere and Isolde. Jo Walton’s Tir Tanagiri Saga mixes myth with history, reimagining King Arthur’s struggle to unite Britain, with its mixture of Roman, British and Anglo-Saxon heritage, under one ruler. Interestingly, these stories are also told from the point of view of a woman, a female solderi fighting under the Arthur-type character.
And for real Arthur enthusiasts, Susan Cooper’s 1970s series The Dark Is Rising makes subtle use of Arthurian legend in her own story of the struggle between good and even. Many fantasy writers throw in a dash of the Arthur myth to give their stories added depth. Monica Furlong in her book Juniper sets the action in a location familar to all Arthur devotees: Cornwall under King Mark.
Is Crossley-Holland sick of Arhur yet? Perhaps yes, although he has plans to give one of the minor characters from the Arthur series a story of her own.
‘The illiterate girl, Gatty, interests me — and I get a lot of letters about her. I want to give her a chance, a way forward, and I’m going to send her on a great journey. Through her, I want to explore what it was like to be a girl at the beginning of the 13th century, and to describe Christian/Muslim contact at that time. It wasn’t all war. Western Europeans learned much from Muslims about philosophy, medicine, mathematics, music …’
This interview first appeared in the 20th December, 2003 issue of The Canberra Times.
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